The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 56 - 15 September 2011
In This Issue
Communities Webinar Replay
AIIM Virtual Conference on Social Business
Grid Computing Isn't Dead
Google's Dart
Seen Recently
CB photo
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Communities of Practice Webinar Replay
The webinar Claude Baudoin gave on August 31, through the Cutter Consortium, on "Creating and Governing Communities of Practice," is available for replay. If you are not a Cutter client and have trouble accessing this, please contact Mark Rosania at Cutter about your interest.
AIIM Virtual Conference on Social Business

On September 8, AIIM (originally founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association, AIIM stands for "Association for Information and Image Management," but it essentially covers the whole domain of Enterprise Content Management, or ECM) held a 6-hour virtual conference.
Andrew McAfee, the Enterprise 2.0 guru, gave a initial keynote talk in which he pointed out that E2.0, which he equated to "social business," lets people dynamically play different roles as they collaborate. He mentioned the "2.0 Lab" at India's Tata Consulting, as well as NASA's use of Innocentive to crowdsource a solution to the forecasting of solar flares, although it is not clear that you can really call this an example of social business.
AIIM's John Mancini presented a "hierarchy of information needs" visibly inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of human needs.
A number of vendors, consultants and users presented case studies: CSC, Oracle, Deutsche Bank, IGLOO, Electronic Arts, Deloitte.
There were two presentations on governance policies for social media, one about Twitter and one about Facebook. This is clearly a topic on which companies need guidance, although they tend to overdo it with complex policies that no one reads.

Grid Computing Isn't Dead After All

During the hype days of grid computing, circa 2005, we saw two kinds of projects: enterprise projects typically "mutualized" servers across departments (and often had trouble maintaining momentum) while large-scale community projects scrounged idle home PC power, but were often seen as frivolous (e.g. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI) although there were worthy projects to search for new molecules for AIDS vaccines, for example.

It had been a long time since such grid efforts were in the news, but the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has launched a distributed computing effort aimed at processing data on space radiation from the SkyNet project.  

Are You Serious This Time?

As Google prepares to launch its new Web programming language, Dart, one is reminded of a few not-so-successful efforts such as the Go language and cloud initiatives like Google Wave (discussed in previous issues of the KIT) and Google+, whose trajectory from hype to fizzle may be one of the shortest in history.

In all fairness, it is often the public (well, at least the geek public) and the professional press that cause the hype, hence a subsequent impression of failure. Google, for its part, is usually careful to describe their projects as experimental. Some of the projects that do not take off undoubtedly have a durable influence on subsequent efforts, and help the entire community set new expectations on how systems can and should work. 

Seen Recently...

"Have concluded that Intuit Quickbooks is, perhaps, the worst software ever released by a major software vendor. Unbelievable."

-- Cloud consultant Bernard Golden, via Twitter (@bernardgolden)

[Wow! I guess his lawyer asked him to insert the word "perhaps"]

 

"No. I will not accept a friend request from your dog."

-- Interactive Marketing expert Dave Peck, via Twitter (@davepeck)